The Urburb. Israeli Pavilion at Venice Architecture Biennale 2014

The Urburb is a neologism referring to the mesh of the urban and suburban, which characterizes the great majority of residential areas in contemporary Israel. To explore the dynamics of conflicting aspects of contemporary living, the Israeli pavilion is transformed into a contemporary construction site furnished with four large sand-printers. They tell the story of 100 years of modernist planning in Israel, from the single building to national master plans.

“In the endlessly expanding Urburban environment, new residential communities continue to pop-up, separated by large expanses of open land, locked-in and dislocated. The installation, like the Urburb itself, is uniform and consistent. It conveys the experience of life in a modernist machine, under the signs of automation and the promise of utopian redemption. As rapidly as the schemes are impressed into the sand, so are they wiped away, emphasizing how these generic pattern-oriented plans are “printed” from above in compliance with changing ideologies and master plans.”

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